Grief Quotes - Page 6

Come, my child," I said, trying to lead her away. "Wish good-bye to the poor hare, and come and look for blackberries.""Good-bye, poor hare!" Sylvie obediently repeated, looking over her shoulder at it as we turned away. And then, all in a moment, her self-command gave way. Pulling her hand out of mine, she ran back to where the dead hare was lying, and flung herself down at its side in such an agony of grief as I could hardly have believed possible in so young a child."Oh, my darling, my darling!" she moaned, over and over again. "And God meant your life to be so beautiful!

Do our dreams carry messages from the great beyond, sent by the people we have lost, or are they a reflection of our desperation and wishful thinking?

...there was something in the texture of the weave that felt happy: theecho of a memory so far down in his soul it was all emotion, aburst of colour and warmth, adrift from time and place.

I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.

Death seemed to lose its terrors and to borrow a grace and dignity in sublime keeping with the life that was ebbing away.

The truth is, we never know what life will bring us and we don't have as much control as we might think we have. But we CAN choose how we walk through life and how we spend our time.

Before I could catch it, my heart slammed straight down to my feet, leaving me with a massive hole in my chest. It was amazing how I could just be going along, doing okay, and then suddenly-wham-I missed her so much even my fingernails hurt.

And then Jonah heard God’s voice.t“Jonah, do you know what the difference is between you and the trees?”ttHe was confident it was God because God usually asked questions but gave no answers. Jonah didn’t need a divine answer to this question, he knew it.t“Yes,” he said. “The difference between me and the trees is that the trees let go of their leaves. I keep holding onto mine. The trees make room for new life. I don’t.

...it is love, imperfect and unordered, that keeps them apart, even as it holds them somehow together...

Remember: God's grief at the unspeakable things we do to one another is beyond measuring, but so is His mercy. It might seem a terrible thing to say to people who've lost and suffered so much at the hands of hatred and violence. But true courage is not to hate our enemy, any more than to fight and kill him. To love him, to love in the teeth of his hate—that is real bravery. That ought to earn people m-m-medals.

Nothing is lost that love remembers.

Life hands us storms so we can paint rainbows.

Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.

I don't think those who die are any better than those who stay alive. They just look better. They can't mess anything up anymore.

Just as it is impossible to explain childbirth to a woman who has never given birth, it is impossible to explain child loss to a person who has never lost a child.

We can't choose our lives, but we can decide what to do with the joys or griefs we're given.

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds that sees into the bottom of my grief?

I often wondered after David’s death: Had they known something then? Did their very souls recognize each other? Did Jacob, closer to God than anyone else I knew, somehow sense this was the last time he would see his grandpa? Hadthere been a message to the little boy in David’s long-held gaze? Did these two people—the six-year-old boy and the sixty-year-old man— realize something the rest of us didn’t?

I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as I’m sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there’s room for almost everything; for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future…

But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...

Today's tears sweep the road to tomorrow's blessings.

Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.

Time possesses emotional potency. For persons whom suffer from of bereavement, time possesses a healing capacity. Passage of time cures heartache by dimming the mind’s attunement to painful occurrences. For some people, the passage of time is akin to placing a welcomed physical boundary between themselves and past horrors. Passage of time allows us to forget and the ability to forget is medicinal. Time acts as a mental barrier between our present mental state and the pain that we once felt.

Sometimes there was the pure, primal pain of grief, and other times there was anger, the frantic desire to claw and hit and kill, and sometimes, like right now, ther was just ordinary, dull sadness, settling itself softly, suffocatingly over her like a heave fog.She was just so damned sad.

It is incredible how many hurts can be healed by the two words, 'I'm sorry.

You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

It was like someone had died- like I had died. Because it had been more than just losing the truest of true loves, as if that were not enough to kill anyone. It was also losing a whole future, a whole family- the whole life that I'd chosen... 

Cooper's tremendous love and energy and unchained freedom had captured life itself. Now, as the last shovelful covered him forever, I knew I would always carry a big piece of Cooper Half Malamute with me until I too was covered by the earth.

You always hear all these statements like "Freedom isn't free." You hear the President talking about all these people making sacrifices. But you never really know until you carry one of them in a casket. When you feel their bodyweight. When you feel them. That's when you know. That's when you understand.

Ice upon ice, and yet, inside, she melted and mourned all the same.

I can tell you that it's okay to feel whatever it is you're feeling right now. It's okay to miss him and it's okay to hurt and it's okay to feel lost-just as long as you come to me, or your friends, or your family, when all those feelings try to overwhelm you. Because in amongst all those feelings, some of you are going to be angry, and some of you will need someone to blame. It's okay to be angry. I can't tell you if it's right or wrong to feel blame, but what I can say is don't be angry for too long and don't hold on to the blame forever. That kind of anger can take away a piece of you, a piece of you that you might not get back.

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.

The black color is much deeper than to be overwhelmed by grief… Black hides everything within itself in the argument of elegance.

Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aidbeing ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbellyof a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times Istayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that Iwould not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that myfather worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to comehome to a house that felt too big for us.

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

... that same hardware and tackle shop his dad got lost in for hours while Kache waited in the truck, writing lyrics on the backs of old envelopes his mom kept in the glove compartment for blotting her lipstick. Kache had written around the red blooms of her lip prints.

Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.

If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart.

for my grief's so greatThat no supporter but the huge firm earthCan hold it up: here I and sorrows sit;Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.(Constance, from King John, Act III, scene 1)

For Achilles, the death of Patroclus pushed him into a fury, but it was not only grief that drove him. It was also a sense of shame and guilt because he had not been there to protect his friend. Sometimes men in combat feel this sort of survivor’s guilt even though, realistically, they could have done nothing to prevent their comrade’s death.

Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.

In our springtime there is no better,there is no worse.Blossoming branches burgeon as they must.Some are long,some are short.Stay upright.Stay with life.

Secrets are festering parasites to a relationship, devouring their hosts from within, leaving behind a empty hollow husk of what once was.

Grief, we know where we've been. We know where we want to be.

We must learn to live in this world, because we have no other choice. What we do have a choice in is how we choose to live. We can remain gray and immobile in the wake of our losses or we can open ourselves up to the world, let the sunshine in, fill our surroundings with heaps of flowers, and know that we loved someone truly and deeply.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

When my mother died, I thought I’d drown in sorrow. But my grandmother said something very wise, and I’ve always held it close to my heart. She said that not even the sea is infinite, and neither is grief.

What I've always taken away from his words is the sense that we all have something that confines us, that seeks to define us, label us, belittling us in the process, shortchanging our potential. Can it be that that is our sanctuary, our refuge, our way to liberty?

A shade of sorrow passed over Taliesin's face. 'There are those,' he said gently, 'who must first learn loss, despair, and grief. Of all paths to wisdom, this is the cruelest and longest. Are you one who must follow such a way? This even I cannot know. If you are, take heart nonetheless. Those who reach the end do more than gain wisdom. As rough wool becomes cloth, and crude clay a vessel, so do they change and fashion wisdom for others, and what they give back is greater than what they won.

The process of recovering from addictiveness happens at a deeper level of consciousness and through feeling our pain without using old addictive fixes. There is no escaping that getting in touch with our original pain is the touchstone to mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

She closes her eyes, and I can see the moisture. She’s deep-breathing again, and I notice her hands are clutched around the opposing wrists, nails digging in deep, hard, scratching. Pain to replace pain.

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on

I was disinterested in everything, even in Ethan. Even, I was ashamed to admit, in Ella. I didn’t know where else I wanted to be but I knew it was anywhere except on this earth, in my body, living my life.

He also knew the language of The Klingons, but the army had no use for it.

Only by the shuddering of the bed did Toby realize the girl was sobbing. Molly herself made no sound; it was as though her grief was trapped in a jar, her cries inaudible to anyone but her.

I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in your grief, one day that madness will stir in the chair, and it will say to him, 'You look pale.

Alex had cooked, and coaxed, and helped Mark form borders around the shapeless days. Alex had given meaning to the word "servant".

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot - he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza's dream was something he could not endure.